Watch: First U.S. Trailer For Jean-Pierre Jeunet's 'The Young And Prodigious T.S. Spivet' Which Opens This Week

Harvey Weinstein, champion of auteur filmmakers? Not always. Earlier this year, Jean-Pierre Jeunet claimed Harv wanted to re-edit and/or recut his latest film, “The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet.” It’s a complaint that Bong Joon-Ho (“Snowpiercer“) and Olivier Dahan (“Grace Of Monaco“) have also recently leveled at the head of The Weinstein Company, but even their films got treated much better than this.

Essentially being dumped into theaters tomorrow, the studio has finally released the first U.S. trailer for movie. How’s that for support? Kyle Catlett, Niamh Wilson, Helena Bonham Carter, Callum Keith Rennie, and Judy Davis star in the movie about a young boy who wins a contest at the Smithsonian Institute, which changes his life. Here’s the official synopsis:

T.S. Spivet lives on a ranch in Montana with his mother who is obsessed with the morphology of beetles, his father (a cowboy born a hundred years too late) and his 14 year-old sister who dreams of becoming Miss America. T.S. is a 10 year-old prodigy with a passion for cartography and scientific inventions. One day, he receives an unexpected call from the Smithsonian museum telling him that he is the winner of the very prestigious Baird prize for his discovery of the perpetual motion machine and that he is invited to a reception in his honor where he is expected to give a speech. Without telling anyone, he sets out on a freight train across the U.S.A. to reach Washington DC. There is also Layton, twin brother of T.S., who died in an accident involving a firearm in the family’s barn, which no one ever speaks of. T.S. was with him, measuring the scale of the gunshots for an experiment, and he doesn’t understand what happened.

You can read our review of the movie from the U.K. release last year right here, and while we didn’t care for it, Jeunet certainly deserves better consideration from a Hollywood studio and producer.

Before you watch the trailer below, there’s another long-shelved movie finally getting a theatrical release from the Weinsteins. Deadline reports that Mikael Håfström‘s period drama, “Shanghai,” starring John Cusack, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Gong Li, Chow Yun-Fat, David Morse, Ken Watanabe, and Franka Potente, will open on August 21st. This is five years after it opened in China, and the movie has been widely available around the world for years. Guess they need a tax write off or something.